by Primo Levi
Nitrous oxide is made by cautiously heating ammonium nitrate. There was none in the laboratory; there was ammonia and nitric acid instead. Unable to make preliminary calculations, we mixed them until we got a neutral reaction on litmus paper, but as a result the mixture became very hot and emitted a lot of white smoke; then we decided to boil it to get rid of the water. The laboratory quickly filled with an unbreathable fog, which didn’t make us laugh; we stopped the experiment, luckily for us, because we didn’t know what can happen if you heat this explosive salt less than cautiously.
It was neither simple nor much fun. I looked around, and in a corner saw an ordinary dry-cell battery. That’s what we would do: the electrolysis of water. It was an experiment with a sure outcome, which I had already carried out at home several times: Enrico wouldn’t be disappointed.
I put water in a beaker, dissolved a pinch of salt in it, turned two empty jam jars upside down in the beaker, found two rubber-coated copper wires, attached them to the poles of the battery, and inserted the ends into the jars. From them a tiny procession of bubbles rose up into the jars: if you looked carefully, in fact, you could see that more or less twice the gas was being released from the cathode as from the anode. I wrote on the blackboard the well-known equation and explained to Enrico that what was written there was actually happening. Enrico didn’t seem totally convinced, but it was now dark and we were half dead with cold; we washed our hands, bought some chestnut cake, and went home, leaving the electrolysis to continue on its own.
The next day we found the way clear again. In sweet deference to the theory, the cathode jar was almost full of gas, the anode half full: I pointed this out to Enrico, trying to look big, and to inspire in him the suspicion that, I won’t say the electrolysis, but its application, as a demonstration of the law of definite proportions, was an invention of mine, the fruit of patient experiments conducted in the privacy of my room. But Enrico was in a bad mood and questioned everything. “Who says it’s really hydrogen and oxygen?” he said rudely. “What if it’s chlorine? Didn’t you put salt in it?”
To me the objection was offensive: how could Enrico doubt my assertion? I was the theorist, I alone. Although he was the proprietor (to a certain extent, and then only by “transfer”) of the laboratory—in fact, precisely because he was in no position to boast of other qualifications—he should have abstained from criticism. “Now we’ll see,” I said. I carefully lifted up the cathode jar and, holding it with the mouth down, lit a match and brought it close. There was an explosion, small but sharp and angry, the jar splintered (luckily I was holding it at chest height and not higher), and there in my hand, like a sarcastic symbol, was the circular glass bottom of the jar.
We left, discussing what had happened. My legs were trembling slightly; I felt a retrospective fear, and at the same time a certain foolish pride, in having confirmed a hypothesis and unleashed a force of nature. So it really was hydrogen: the same that burns in the sun and the stars, and from whose condensation universes form in eternal silence.
Zinc
For five months, packed in like sardines and reverent, we had been attending Professor P.’s lectures on General and Inorganic Chemistry, taking away from them sensations that varied but were all exciting and new. No, P.’s chemistry was not the engine of the Universe or the key to Truth: P. was a skeptical and ironic old man, an enemy of all rhetoric (that, and only that, was why he was also an anti-Fascist), intelligent, obstinate, and, in his own spiteful way, shrewd.
Stories were handed down of examinations conducted with cold ferocity and ostentatious bias: his preferred victims were women in general and then nuns, priests, and anyone who showed up “in uniform.” Suspicious tales circulated of a maniacal stinginess in his running of the Chemistry Institute and his own laboratory: that he kept boxes and boxes of used matches in the basement and forbade the janitors to throw them away; that in his long-ago youth he had built the mysterious minarets of the institute, which still bestow on that stretch of Corso Massimo d’Azeglio a foolish stamp of false exoticism, so that he could celebrate a foul secret orgy of salvage, burning the year’s rags and filter papers, and personally analyzing the ashes, with miserly patience, to extract any valuable elements (and perhaps even the least valuable), in a sort of ritual palingenesis, at which only Caselli, his loyal technician-porter, was authorized to be present. It was also said of him that he had spent his entire academic career demolishing a certain theory of stereochemistry, not through experiments but through publications. Someone else—his great rival—did the experiments, in some unknown part of the world: one by one, as they were published in Helvetica chimica acta, he tore them to pieces.
I couldn’t swear to the authenticity of these rumors: but, truly, when he entered the Preparations lab, no Bunsen burner was low enough, and so it was prudent to turn them off; truly, he had the students prepare silver nitrate using the five-lire coin with the eagle that they took out of their pockets, and nickel chloride using the twenty-cent piece with the flying naked woman; and, truly, the only time I was admitted to his office I found written on the blackboard, in fine script, “I do not want a funeral, alive or dead.”
I found P. congenial. I liked the sober rigor of his lessons; I was amused by the scornful ostentatiousness with which at exams he wore, in place of the prescribed Fascist shirt, a comical black bib, several inches wide, and how at each of his brusque movements it came untucked from the lapels of his jacket. I appreciated his two textbooks, obsessively clear, concise, filled with his stern disdain for humanity in general and lazy, dull students in particular, because all students, by definition, were lazy and dull; anyone who, by great good luck, managed to show that he was not became his equal, and was honored with a laconic and precious word of praise.
Now our five months of restless waiting had passed: from among us eighty students, the twenty who were least lazy and least dull had been chosen, fourteen boys and six girls, and to us the Preparations laboratory had been opened. What, exactly, it was none of us had a precise idea; it seems to me that it was an invention of his, a modern, technical version of a savage initiation rite, in which each of his subjects was abruptly torn from book and desk and transplanted into the midst of smoke that burned the eyes, acids that burned the hands, and practical events that did not square with theories. I certainly wouldn’t question the usefulness—rather, the necessity—of this initiation: but in the brutality with which it was carried out it was easy to discern P.’s spiteful talent, his instinct for hierarchical distances and contempt for us, his flock. In short: not a word, uttered or written, was wasted by him as a viaticum, to encourage us on the road we had chosen, to indicate to us its dangers and traps, or to pass on to us its tricks. I’ve often thought that P. was at heart a savage, a hunter: a man who goes hunting has only to grab the gun, or, rather, the assegai and the bow, and set off for the forest; success or lack of it depends on him alone. You pick up and go; when the moment arrives seers and augurs have no place, theory is vain, and you learn along the way. The experiences of others are of no use—what’s essential is taking your own measure. The worthy win; those who have weak eyes or arms or sense of smell turn back and change career. Of the eighty I mentioned, thirty changed careers in the second year, and twenty more later.
The laboratory was orderly and clean. We were there for five hours a day, from two until seven; at the entrance, an assistant assigned each of us a preparation, and then we went to the “store,” where the hirsute Caselli handed over the primary material, exotic or domestic—a piece of marble to this one, ten grams of bromine to that one, a little boric acid to the other, a handful of clay to yet another. Caselli entrusted these treasures to us with an undisguised air of suspicion: it was the bread of science, the bread of P., and, finally, it was also his stuff, stuff that he administered; who knew what improper use we, inexpert and profane, might make of it.
Caselli loved P. with a love that was acerbic and polemical. It seems that he had been loyal for forty
years; he was P.’s shadow, his earthly incarnation, and, like all who perform vicarious functions, he was an interesting human specimen—like those, I mean, who represent Authority without possessing it themselves, such as, for example, sacristans, museum guides, janitors, hospital attendants, lawyers’ and notaries’ clerks, sales representatives. These, to greater or lesser degrees, tend to pour the human substance of their Chief into their own mold, as happens with pseudomorphic crystals: sometimes they suffer from it, often they enjoy it, and they possess two distinct schemes of behavior, according to whether they act on their own or “in the exercise of their duties.” It frequently happens that the personality of the Chief invades them so thoroughly that it disturbs their normal human relations, and so they remain celibate: celibacy is in fact prescribed and accepted in the monastic state, which brings with it proximity and subjection to the greatest of authorities. Caselli was a withdrawn, taciturn man in whose melancholy but proud expressions one could read:
He is a great scientist and, as his famulus, I, too, am a little great;
I, though humble, know things that he doesn’t know;
I know him better than he knows himself; I anticipate his actions;
I have power over him; I defend and protect him;
I can speak ill of him because I love him; to you this is not allowed;
His principles are just, but he applies them laxly, and “it wasn’t like that in the old days.” If it weren’t for me . . .
. . . and in fact Caselli managed the institute with a parsimoniousness and an intolerance of innovation superior to those of P. himself.
What fell to my lot, the first day, was the preparation of zinc sulfate. It shouldn’t be too difficult: you had to make an elementary stoichiometric calculation and attack the granulated zinc with previously diluted sulfuric acid; concentrate, crystallize, dry at the pump, wash, and recrystallize. Zinc, zinco, Zink: laundry tubs are made of it, it’s an element that doesn’t say much to the imagination, it’s gray and its salts are colorless, it’s not toxic, it doesn’t provide gaudy chromatic reactions—in other words, it’s a boring element. It’s been known to humanity for two or three centuries and is therefore neither a glorious veteran like copper nor one of those very new trace elements that still contain the thrill of their discovery.
Caselli handed over my zinc; I returned to my counter and got ready to work. I felt curious, ill at ease, and vaguely annoyed, as when, at thirteen, you have to go to temple to recite the bar mitzvah prayer, in Hebrew, in front of the rabbi: the moment, longed for and a little feared, had arrived. The hour had struck for the appointment with Matter, the great antagonist of Spirit: the hyle, which, oddly, is embalmed in the endings of the alkyl roots—methyl, butyl, and so forth.
The other raw material, zinc’s partner, that is, sulfuric acid, you didn’t have to get from Caselli: there was plenty of it everywhere. Concentrated, naturally: it has to be diluted with water. But be careful, all the books say, you have to operate in reverse; that is, pour the acid into the water and not vice versa, otherwise that innocuous-looking oil can be subject to furious rages—even high school boys know this. Then you put the zinc in the diluted acid.
Written in the lecture notes was a detail that at first reading had escaped me, and that is that tender, delicate zinc, so yielding in the face of acids, which make a single mouthful of it, behaves quite differently when it’s very pure: then it stubbornly resists attack. Two opposing philosophical conclusions could be drawn: praise of purity, which protects us from evil like a hauberk; praise of impurity, which lets in change—that is, life. I threw out the first, as grossly moralistic, and paused to consider the second, which was more congenial to me. For the wheel to turn, for life to live, impurities are needed, and the impurities of impurities: in the earth, too, as we all know, if it is to be fertile. We need dissent, difference, the grain of salt, the mustard seed. Fascism doesn’t want them, forbids them, and so you’re not a Fascist; it wants everyone to be the same, and you are not the same. But immaculate virtue doesn’t exist, or if it does it’s detestable. So take the solution of copper sulfate, which is in the reagents cupboard, add a drop of your sulfuric acid, and you’ll see the reaction get under way: the zinc awakens, develops a white skin of hydrogen bubbles, and we’re there, the spell has been cast, you can leave it to its fate and take a short walk through the laboratory to see what’s new and what the others are doing.
The others were doing various things: some were working intently, maybe whistling to give an appearance of casualness, each with his particle of hyle; others wandered about or looked out the windows at Valentino Park, which was now completely green; still others were smoking or chatting here and there.
In one corner was a hood, and in front of the hood sat Rita. I approached, and realized with fleeting pleasure that she was cooking the very dish I was: with pleasure because for some time I had been hovering around Rita. In my mind I prepared brilliant conversational openings, and then at the decisive moment didn’t dare speak, putting it off till the next day. I didn’t dare because of a deep timidity and distrust, and also because Rita discouraged contact, I don’t know why. She was very thin, pale, sad, and self-assured; she passed the exams with good grades but without a genuine appetite—such as I felt—for the things she studied. She wasn’t friendly with anyone, no one knew anything about her, she said little, and for all these reasons she attracted me. I tried to sit next to her in class, but she wasn’t very welcoming, and I felt frustrated and challenged. Rather, I felt desperate, and certainly not for the first time; during that period, in fact, I believed I was condemned to a perpetual male solitude, denied forever a woman’s smile, something I needed as I needed air.
It was clear that this day offered an occasion that could not be wasted: between Rita and me there existed at that moment a bridge, a little bridge of zinc, narrow but practicable; come now, take the first step.
Buzzing around Rita I became aware of a second lucky circumstance: a well-known cover was sticking out of her purse, yellow with a red border, and on the cover stood a crow with a book in its beak. The title? Only a few letters could be read, but that was enough for me: it was my own guide in those months, the timeless story of Hans Castorp in his enchanted exile on the Magic Mountain. I asked Rita what she thought of it, filled with anxiety about her opinion, as if I had written the book myself: and I soon had to admit that she was reading the novel in a completely different way. As a novel, to be exact: she was interested in knowing how far Hans would go with Madame Chauchat, and she skipped relentlessly the fascinating (to me) political, theological, and metaphysical discussions of the humanist Settembrini and the Jewish Jesuit Naphta. It doesn’t matter: better, there’s room for debate. It could even become an essential and fundamental debate, because I, too, am a Jew and she isn’t: I am the impurity that makes the zinc react, I am the grain of salt, the mustard seed. Impurity, certainly: since La Difesa della Razza1 had just begun publication in those months, and there was a lot of talk about purity, and I was starting to be proud of being impure. The truth is that until then being Jewish hadn’t much mattered to me: privately, and with my Christian friends, I had always considered my origin as a nearly negligible but curious fact, a small, cheerful anomaly, like having a crooked nose or freckles; a Jew is someone who doesn’t have a Christmas tree, who shouldn’t eat salami but eats it anyway, who learned a little Hebrew at the age of thirteen and then forgot it. According to the periodical cited above, a Jew is miserly and clever: but I was not especially miserly or clever, nor was my father.
So there was much to discuss with Rita, but the conversation I meant to have didn’t get going. I soon realized that Rita was different from me; she wasn’t a mustard seed. She was the daughter of a poor, invalid shopkeeper. The university, for her, was not the temple of Knowledge: it was a thorny and laborious path that led to a degree, a job, and an income. She had worked since childhood: she had helped her father, had been a clerk in a village shop, and even n
ow bicycled through Turin to make deliveries and collect payments. All this did not distance me from her; on the contrary, I found it admirable, like everything about her—her uncared-for hands, her shabby clothes, her firm gaze, her concrete sadness, the reserve with which she accepted my conversation.
So my zinc sulfate ended badly. It became a concentrate and was reduced to a white powder that gave off in suffocating clouds all or almost all of its sulfuric acid. I abandoned it to its fate and offered to accompany Rita home. It was dark, and her home wasn’t near. The goal I had proposed to myself was objectively modest, but to me it seemed of an unparalleled audacity: I hesitated for half the way, and felt I was on burning coals, and intoxicated myself and her with breathless, rambling conversation. Finally, trembling with emotion, I inserted my arm under hers. Rita didn’t withdraw, and yet she didn’t return the grip; but I adjusted my pace to hers and felt happy and victorious. It seemed to me that I had won a small yet decisive battle against the darkness, the emptiness, and the hostile years that were coming on.
1. La Difesa della Razza (Defense of the Race) was a violently anti-Semitic biweekly that began publication in 1938.
Iron
Outside the walls of the Chemistry Institute it was night, Europe’s night: Chamberlain had returned, duped, from Munich; Hitler had entered Prague without firing a shot; Franco had subdued Barcelona and was sitting in Madrid. Fascist Italy, a lesser pirate, had occupied Albania, and premonitions of the imminent catastrophe had condensed like a sticky dew in the houses and the streets, in cautious conversations and drowsy consciences.